Posts by kriskorn

Collis made a new post about VAT, but a lot of authors/buyers do not visit Envato’s blog, so I am just copying it here.

In the last few months there’s been lots of posts around the financial tools that we provide to authors on Envato Market. Today we’re looping back on some of the issues I previously promised updates on.

Update on Statements

Back at the beginning of September we rolled out a new emphasis on buyers and some underlying changes to our fee structure. You can read the author rundown of the rollout here.

One of the side-effects was a change to the gross sale value that authors make. We temporarily removed this column from the Statement while we did some behind the scenes work. That information has now been returned and correctly filled from the date of the change (September 1 2014) onwards (it’s listed as the ‘price’ column). This is an important piece of information for authors calculating their annual income (before the expense of our Author Fee).

We’re now back to working on the major statement upgrade that I’ve mentioned a few times recently. For authors the main changes will be:

Historically we have shown a transaction as a single line showing the gross sale and net earning amounts, with the author fee implied as the difference. Going forward, we’re switching to a more overt display. Once the upgrade is complete, statements will show a line for the gross sale, then a separate line for the author fee expense. You can calculate the net earning from those two numbers. Historic records won’t change in formatting, this will be prospective only.
Commercial documents will accompany and be linked up to transactions. These will include Invoices (for item sales), Receipts (for deposits) and Credit Notes (for refunds).
Each month authors will have a bulk Author Fee invoice from Envato to the Author that aggregates all the author fees from that month into a single document.
We’ll be introducing limited buyer information against each sale.
We’ve identified that it makes most sense to release these changes in tandem or close to the VAT release early in the new year so that the new documents are correctly displayed for VAT purposes as well. This has delayed the upgrades while we pull together the VAT work.

Update on the Handling Fee

In the same release which introduced the buyer fee, we announced that we would be continuing to wind down the handling fee. We’ve taken another step towards this goal with the introduction of the shopping cart this month which allows buyers to group items together. Since the handling fee rules apply to the entire basket, fewer buyers are now hitting the handling fee.

Update on the Business Model

Last month I wrote that given the community’s concerns, we would be working on ways to alleviate those concerns, ranging from reviewing our core business model through to better tooling and management of compliance burdens.

The review of the core business model is still going. Making a change there would be a substantial shift, and have positive and negative consequences for authors. We’ve got a major team assessing the impact, but it’s not small, and can’t be rushed. In the meantime we’re continuing to make our current approach more consistent and coherent.

On management of compliance burdens, we’re still progressing work on US State and Local Tax (SALT) work, and I expect to have more details early in the new year. Alongside this, we’re still investigating other countries that figure highly with our userbase such as Canada.

Specific Case Concerns

As I’ve mentioned in all previous posts, if you have concerns about your specific circumstances, please contact taxinfo@envato.com to discuss.